


Backstage 45 - Jack Be Nimble

by Aadler



Series: Backstage Stories [45]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-28 08:33:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20061082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aadler/pseuds/Aadler
Summary: Season: between post-Seventh Buffy)Spoiler(s): “Chosen” (Buffy, S7-22)Teaser: A Slayer walks into a bar … and it’snotFaith …





	1. Chapter 1

  
**Banner by [SRoni](http://sroni.livejournal.com)**

**Jack Be Nimble**  
by Aadler  
**Copyright July 2019**

* * *

Disclaimer: Characters from _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ and _Angel: the Series_ are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.

This story was done for the 2019 round of [Summer of Giles](http://summer_of_giles.livejournal.com).

* * *

**Note:** The story contains references to events in “[Hell Hath No Fury](http://archiveofourown.org/works/84288)” (and “[First Do No Harm](http://archiveofourown.org/works/169804)” might also be informative).

* * *

There was a deal going around a while back (did they call it a meme? I can’t remember if that term had come in yet, and even if it _had,_ things like that tended to take time to trickle down into such circles): _Did I ever tell you about the time I almost killed the Slayer?_

As far as I could tell, some of the claims were in earnest — and some of the claimants could get belligerent, or even actively violent, if they thought they detected any doubt from their audience — but some were clearly presented for the entertainment value, and almost _all_ the listeners were in it mainly for the pleasure of the story being told. Part of that was the fun of hearing the latest variation on a familiar theme, watching for any new twist or approach; a lot of it, though, had a strong flavor of _Man, wouldn’t something like that be sweet?_

I heard the stories, even enjoyed some, but never with that last element of wistful _if only_. I had goals of my own, but none of them included seeing a Slayer die. I wasn’t hugely dismayed by the prospect of such a thing happening, it just wasn’t _necessary._

Even though it was never my own aim, though, it came to me anyhow. So sit back, and let me tell you about the time I almost killed the Slayer.

… Or _**a**_ Slayer, at any rate.

* * *

The first time I saw the interior of Willy’s wasn’t actually that long ago, but it might as well have been a century in terms of how naïve I was: I had just learned about the existence of this new world, and was determined to learn more, but I was the greenest FNG imaginable. (Honestly, I suspect the only reason I didn’t get eaten on the spot was that all the patrons were watching to see exactly how I came to grief, rather than anyone pushing forward to do the job himself.) My first impression at the time was of something like the _Star Wars_ cantina scene, only viewed through hell-glasses. Years later, with more experience under my belt, I think of it more in terms of an actual watering hole: a place where unlikely species converge for a common purpose, seldom on anything like friendly terms but mostly leaving each other alone.

One thing is for sure: if a city or even a town has any kind of substantial demon/occult population, you’ll find a place like Willy’s. Another thing, it’s almost always a human owning and running the joint, even if the bouncer and bartender are demons (and sometimes even the waitresses). Which makes sense, if you think about it. First, it’s a lot easier for a human to deal with other humans in arranging for licenses, utilities, inventory, things like that. Second, humans of a particular type are more likely to overlook the conflicts of a variable and occasionally violent customer base if there’s money to be made.

Maybe if I ever get tired of my current lifestyle, I’ll take a try at the business myself. I definitely know the fundamental ins and outs of the subculture, and I’ve seen how enough different proprietors handled things, in enough different joints, to have picked up a pretty solid sense of the ground rules. But that would have to come after I’ve completed certain … shall we say, matters of overriding priority.

The place in Fort Wayne was called Del’s, and it had all the externals I was accustomed to seeing: no sign, darkened windows, general air of shabbiness. Demon bars don’t _want_ to be noticed, customers who can’t find them by word of mouth are customers that aren’t especially welcome.

Me, I’m always welcome. I’m a people person … or I can fake it, if needed, plus I’m fairly liberal as to what I include in the ‘people’ class. Tonight, for example, I was hanging out with Merl; not even business, just keeping up the acquaintance while I waited for an opportunity to follow out business elsewhere. I like spending time with Merl because I know I _can_ take him on physically, five times out of five, and he likes hanging out with me (not that he’ll ever admit to actually enjoying something) because he knows I _won’t_ kill him — or even just beat the hell out of him — purely on a whim. Circles we run in, that makes us bosom buddies.

We were in the middle of an argument about baseball (I know very little about baseball, and care even less, but Merl has violent opinions on the drop-third-strike rule, and I was feeding him cues so he could have the pleasure of loudly and offensively disagreeing with me) when he broke off, glancing over my shoulder and then just as quickly looking away again. “I don’t know, man,” he muttered. “We might want to take this someplace else.”

I had a fairly clear sense of where that lizard-eyed gaze had been focused, but I didn’t want to draw attention to myself by obviously swiveling around to look. Instead I shifted in my seat, very casually, so I’d be placed to jump up and sprint for the exit if need be. “Trouble?” I asked him.

“Could be.” Merl was slouching in the booth, doubtless trying to sink below ready notice. “Either bringin’ it, or havin’ it follow her, that’s how it usually is with this type.”

That didn’t sound like immediate threat, so I turned to reach for some napkins from the table to my left, which was enough to let me scan, at the edge of my vision, what Merl was wanting not to be spotted watching. It was just a glimpse, but even in that half-second I could see some justification for Merl’s unease. Female (or at least female-shaped) and maybe five-foot-ten, except some of that came from thick-soled, extremely clunky shoes … only, the shoes themselves might be designed to conceal the shape of the feet they covered, because other details argued against this being an actual human. Even though she wore some kind of yellow-tinted glasses, like those things that are supposed to reduce night-glare for driving, I could tell from across the room that there was something wrong with her eyes; pale green streaks shot through her hair, which wasn’t that unlike some current styles, but the color matched both her outfit and the short horn-like things protruding downward toward her jawline from behind her ears, and there was prominent hair (also greenish) on her knuckles. She had her back to the bar and was watching the room with a kind of hostility that didn’t seem to be centered on anything in particular, just general bad temper, and sticking up over her shoulder I could see the hilt of a sword, doubtless in a back-slung sheath and pretty damn big if the blade was proportionate to the rest.

I’d swung back to Merl without pausing, simply letting the image register and then assessing the details from memory. “She doesn’t look happy at all,” I observed, low-voiced. “Don’t know the species, is that kind given to berserker brawls? or do they, or she, just have some kind of grudge against you in particular?”

Merl looked disgusted (okay, he always looks disgusted, but there are degrees that you can learn to recognize) and said, “You didn’t turn far enough. Not the green one, the tweenager just a little more toward the door.”

This time I swiveled far enough to get the salt shaker from that other table, and caught what Merl had to be talking about. Also female, maybe five-foot-two; not really a tween, she looked maybe fifteen but that could be deceptive. She was wearing cargo pants and lace-up half-boots, and a Muppets t-shirt under some kind of long vest made of gauzy scarf material, and she couldn’t possibly have seemed any more out of place. This wasn’t a heavy night at Del’s, but there were dozens of demons of various species spread around the interior, unmistakably non-human even in the areas of low lighting, and she wasn’t fazed by any of it. She looked a little impatient, a little annoyed, a little uncertain … but even that last wasn’t _What am I doing here?_, more like _I know it’s got to be_ **one** _of these doors, which one do I knock on?_

Figuratively speaking, of course; not actual doors, just deciding on her next step. She’d come a bit farther into the room, so I could track her without turning my head again. Keeping her in my peripheral vision, I murmured to Merl, “Slayer?”

“What else?” he grumped. “Had to dump my favorite bar ’cause they were all over it, even moved to a different _state,_ but there’s just no gettin’ away from ’em.”

I knew what Merl had meant by trouble. There were only two reasons a Slayer would come alone to a place like this: looking for a fight, or looking for information but _ready_ for a fight. Okay, some of the newer ones just liked to see the stuff they’d been hearing about, but they tended to show up in small groups chaperoned by more combat-blooded big sisters. I could hold my own in the rough places, and had, but supernatural smackdowns were chancy at best, and I’d never gone up against a Slayer or had any desire to do so. It’s a tricky balancing act, pursuing my current goals without closing off future possibilities, and Slayers are not known for caring about such fine distinctions. In fact, the more zealous among them might consider me to be a legitimate target simply because I made the occasional deal with the occasional demon, disregarding the fact that nobody (well, hardly anybody) was ever hurt by said dealings.

Which might pose a problem, because after a few words with the barman — who seemed genuinely to _be_ a man, even if you can’t take such things for granted — she turned and was headed for our table. “Aw, hell,” Merl moaned, eyes darting in all directions. He’d chosen to sit on the inside of the booth, though, where he could see the rest of the bar, and my position blocked a quick escape for him. He could run only if I did, and I’d already decided to play things differently.

She stopped, just outside the reach of any weapon I might have decided to swing. Up close she looked all that much more preposterously unthreatening: freckles, hair growing out from what had been a pixie cut, maybe even the last vestiges of baby fat. Even her voice sounded like something out of junior high, bright and chipper, but again the tone didn’t match how that kind of person should be behaving in a place like this. “Hi, I’m looking for Merl. Guy at the bar says you’re him.”

Merl was frozen where he sat: panic-paralysis, but you’d have to know the body language of his species to recognize it. I laughed. “Hear that, Bart? They still can’t tell you from Merl.”

That snapped him out of it, and he sneered at the newcomer. “Always the same thing with you bunch. Merl is _Hweet_, I’m _Krim_. Not the same thing at all.” She tilted her head slightly, clearly doubtful but not really seeming to particularly care, and Merl went on. “He’s more gray than I am. — Well, not _gray,_ but you humans don’t have a word for the color because you don’t see in that register. Different color, different species … different guy. Sorry, I can’t help you.”

She was listening, but didn’t look impressed. “You seem pretty gray to me.”

“Yeah, I know, we all look alike.” Merl shook his head in disgust. “Thanks for the stereotype, lady. Maybe I can do the same for you sometime.”

We had the conversational momentum, even if I didn’t think the girl was completely buying our schtick, so I said, “Take it easy, Bart. You and Merl know some of the same people, so maybe you might be able to help with whatever she wants from him.” I grinned. “I _know_ you’d enjoy telling him you snagged a commission that would’ve been his otherwise.”

She glanced at me warily. “I’m not carrying enough money to manage a decent bribe, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

I gave her a smile. “Then we’ll have to see if we can work out some kind of mutually beneficial trade. All part of the negotiation, pull up a chair.”

Merl watched unhappily as she snagged one from the next table and set it down beside me. He didn’t know where I was headed on this (I was still pulling it together in my own head), but he knew enough to play along, and I _had_ deflected the Slayer who had come seeking him, even if that only lasted a few more minutes. “Not crazy about the whole ‘negotiation’ thing,” she said, “but whatever. So if he’s not Merl, who are you?”

“I go by Cale,” I told her easily. “Cale Parker.”

Her mouth turned slightly in something that wasn’t quite a sneer, and her tone was ironic. “Yeah, ’cause that’s _totally_ your real name. Got it.”

I kept my smile exactly as it already was. “It’s the name I’m known by in places like this, which is what matters.” I cocked my head toward her. “And what should I call you?”

She shrugged, either genuinely not caring or really selling it. “Katie, Katie from Cali.” She did a half-turn in her chair to look around us, and observed, “The good thing about demon bars? nobody asks to see an ID if I want a beer. The bad thing? I wouldn’t trust anything they gave me to drink.”

“Understandable,” I said. “How’s about this, then? Decide what you want and I’ll order two in _unopened_ bottles or cans. When they arrive, pick whichever you like, then watch while I drink from the other one before you start. That should make it safe enough.” I shrugged. “As safe as being in here in the first place, at any rate.”

She raised an eyebrow. “Pretty slick.”

I was still smiling. “Like I said, part of the negotiation.”

She made her choice, and I ordered and paid, with Merl — as usual — sticking to Dr Pepper. When the beers arrived, she left hers untouched at her elbow, and watched closely while I popped my can and took a solid swallow. I gave her a winning smile, asking, “Satisfied?”

She shook her head. “Not yet.” I shrugged and raised the can again, and she held up one hand. “Just wait a little bit, okay?”

Merl’s face held its customary instinctual sneer, but I was actually feeling the good humor I made sure to project. This kid was so cute, and earnest, and nowhere near as naïve as she looked. Yes, there were definitely some folks who would happily poison an entire table to get an edge against a Slayer … and if they _knew_ she was a Slayer (because why go for sneaky otherwise?), they’d use something that hit hard and fast. She kept an eye on both of us, my hands especially, while seeming to take in everything around her at the same time; when a couple of minutes had passed without me going into convulsions, she reached across to take my beer, tested it with a cautious sip, and then chugged about half the can. “Wow,” she said when she paused for breath. _“That_ hit the spot.”

I shot her a quick grin and reached over to get the unopened can in front of her. “So,” I said as I popped the tab. “Who is it that you need Merl to put you in touch with?”

“That’s part of the problem,” she admitted. After the first good belt, she seemed in no huge hurry to glug down the rest of her drink, just sat with one hand casually over the top of it. “I don’t have a name for him, or a species. Just the kind of overall stuff he deals in, and a tip that Merl” (she looked straight at ‘Bart’ as she said it) “could probably point me in the right direction.”

I thought about it. “Yeah, that’s pretty general, all right. So what kind of ‘stuff’ are we talking about?”

She glanced at me, then Merl, then back, probably trying to decide how much she could afford to give away to a couple of hustlers who might not actually know anything. “I guess you’d kinda call it materiel and support,” she said at last. “Like, if somebody had a big project to put together, they’d get him to arrange special equipment, supplies, maybe even some contractors who could do custom construction and keep their mouths shut about it afterward.”

Okay, that actually sounded interesting. I wasn’t working anything along those lines right now, but you never know when some little bit of knowledge might come in handy. “Big project, you said. How big would we be talking about?”

Again the _Okay, how much can I afford to give away?_ look. “Let’s say the size of … of a North Sea oil platform.”

Yes, _that_ would be impressive, demanding, and yet still doable. I looked over to Merl. “That ringing any bells, Bart?”

“Still kinda vague,” he grunted. “This ‘guy’ you’re lookin’ to find: we talkin’ human, demon, or demon passing for human?”

She frowned, but this wasn’t like her previous hesitation. “I don’t actually know. My source was … cryptic.” She took another respectable pull at the beer, her eyes briefly somewhere else. “Just from all the other stuff, I’d guess either human, or enough human_like_ that he could make deals with regular people without them totally freaking out.” She shrugged. “Like I said, it’s a guess, but it seems to make sense. Human, human-looking, or else _really_ good at schmoozing.”

I’d felt something in Merl jitter when she said the part about an oil platform, so he _did_ know something even if he was trying not to show it. The girl didn’t seem to have noticed, but she might be hiding it just as I was; on the other hand, I was fairly sure you had to know Merl really well — or his species, at the least — to catch the cues. “Okay, not a lot to go on,” I said after a thoughtful pause. “I’d still say we’re narrowing it down a little.” I tilted an eyebrow at her. “So why do you want to find this guy? why is it important?”

Her face tightened just a bit, and the look she gave me was distinctly unpromising. “I don’t think that’s any of your business.”

I smiled at her. I’d been focusing on charm — I’m very good at that — but now I was sending another message. “See, that’s where opinions differ.” I made a small, generic gesture to indicate our surroundings. “How many of the customers in here are keeping an eye on this table right now?”

Without looking around, she answered, “Just now … pretty much all of ’em.”

“Uh-huh.” I nodded. “And to you, that’s normal. Slayer walks into a demon bar —” (Her eyes showed the reaction, she had to know we knew she was a Slayer, but saying it aloud put things on a different footing.) “— they’re watching her, she’s watching them right back, that’s just how it is. Only that’s not the whole picture.” I leaned toward her, letting my voice go quiet. “See, they’re not just watching you, they’re watching _us talking to you.”_

She took that in, and her mouth crimped a little in annoyance. “And that’s a problem for you.”

“Could be.” I shrugged. “At the very least, some of them will wonder about us. I’m not saying we won’t help you, but it’ll cost us no matter what, so we need to know it’s worth the hassle to us before we go any further.” She was starting to look stubborn, and maybe a little pissed, so I asked, “And you can decide for yourself how important it is to _you:_ as in, does it matter enough to be worth answering a few general questions?”

She frowned and then sighed, and the combination told me she was going to give a little ground even if she didn’t much like it. “It’s not exactly business,” she said reluctantly. “I mean, it’s starting to look like it might be business-_related,_ but mostly it’s personal.” She bit her lip. “Somebody I know, somebody I used to work with, he got word that a favorite aunt had died overseas. Details were slow coming in, and when they did arrive, they seemed maybe a little funny.” Again that slight twist to her mouth, but this time the exasperation wasn’t aimed at me. “Nothing you could put your finger on, but I’ve heard enough cover stories — and told a few — to pay attention when something starts to sound familiar.” She eyed me speculatively. “Dustin … I mean, the guy with the aunt … we’re not close, but we used to be, and since then he’s had my back a few times when I needed it. He wants to know what happened to her, and I owe him enough to ask a few questions.” She shrugged. “So I’m asking.”

I thought about that. “And the aunt was working on a North Sea oil rig at the time?”

“I didn’t say that,” she snapped back … and then, grudgingly, “But maybe something like that. You pull threads, and they connect to other threads, and after a while you’ve got this, this vague framework of _maybe_s. She was out of the country. She died in some kind of large-scale industrial accident, and not just her, either, there were nearly twenty fatalities that I know about so there might be more. And there was _something_ about _something_ that makes it sound like somebody was trying to keep the whole thing outside maritime jurisdiction.” She shook her head. “So I’m figuring oil platform, cruise ship or freighter or tanker, maybe even some big factory thing on some little island. Something like that. And now, yeah, I’m trying to find a guy who’s been known to help set up that kind of stuff.”

The tension from Merl had spiked enough that she might be able to start feeling it herself, so I drummed my fingers on the table to hopefully distract her for a moment. “What you said about threads connecting to other threads,” I told her. “I might be getting something like that myself … hmm.” I gave her a ‘we all know how the game is played here’ smile, and asked, “Is it okay if I have a private word with my associate?”

She took that in, her eyes weighing me and not giving much impression of being especially pleased with what she was seeing. “Yeah, sure, I guess. Just so you know, though: you try anything, I’ll make sure to break both of you before I deal with whatever else might be coming at me.”

I upgraded to a grin at that. “You wound me … and I’d prefer that it stay figurative, so I’m not looking to pull any double-crosses. A minute should be enough, thanks.”

She shrugged, the teenage _what_**ever** hanging in the air without her having to say it; stood up, took both beers, and stepped away from the table, turning her back to provide the requested privacy and beginning to sip alternately from either can. The green woman at the bar stiffened, bristling at her, but Katie just cocked her head in that direction (I could feel the challenging lifted-eyebrow from where I was), and the other one settled back with a snarling twist of her mouth.

Once I could see that no fight was _immediately_ in the offing, I turned back to Merl. I had a good idea how keen Slayer hearing was, so I kept my voice low. “You know something about what she’s asking,” I said. Not a question.

“Maybe,” he mumbled. “More I hear, more it sounds like she’s starting to zero in on something I mighta been a little bitty part of a while back. Man, I don’t _want_ to know something a Slayer wants to learn about, those chicks are deeply bad cess.”

“Know what you mean,” I said even though I didn’t; Merl is a world-class wuss, he’ll occasionally take some risks in order to get what he wants but he’s never learned to enjoy himself while he does it. “But she’s here, and better we give her something than she starts to think you’re holding out on her. So what you know, does it include … oh, for instance, the name or location of the person she’s looking for?”

He glared at me. “You’re gonna love this one. In fact, if I couldn’t see Skipper over there doesn’t like you or trust you, I’d think you set up the whole thing, ’cause the guy she wants? he’s the same one you been tryin’ to sweet-talk me into givin’ you the inside track to get at.”


	2. Chapter 2

The truth is, I wasn’t even really surprised. I’ve got to know Merl pretty well, at least enough to detect the difference between him being pissed off and being pissed off at _me,_ and there had been just a whiff of that from him the last few minutes. Even if he didn’t believe I’d arranged it, he knew he was being crowded into a corner and knew it might give me something I wanted — without him getting any profit out of the deal — and that was more than enough to make him extra-grumpy. “Cholk,” I said to him, smiling. “You’re telling me Cholk is who Katie’s trying to find.”

And the full-on Merl sneer was back. “I’m tellin’ you a little job I did, I won’t say when, had Cholk’s fingerprints all over it, and it was on an old platform rig made over to pass for parts of a cruise ship to some schmuck walkin’ around with a big ol’ whammy in his brain.”

Sometimes my luck is so fantastic, it’s like I really did make a deal with the devil. (Except, no, the actual Lord of Hell — or about as close as you can get — has a grudge against me that I’m doing my best to outrun, that being the point of most of my current activities.) Still smiling, I laid a hand on his shoulder, at once reassuring him and reinforcing the dominance I had to maintain. “Come on, Merl,” I said. “This is gonna be a good one, trust me here —”

I’ve developed fairly keen instincts for survival over the last few years, but this time it was the sudden alarm in Merl’s eyes that tipped me off. I grabbed his other shoulder and muscled him two-handed into the nearest alcove, swiveling to take in the threat while ready to swing him around as a shield between me and any unannounced peril. Not necessary, the pertinent events had started a moment before and well away from the both of us.

I faced back around at the exact instant the green woman at the bar clotheslined a Filinbanc demon as he started past her. He was moving hard and forceful, but her forearm across his throat was powerful enough to slam his upper body back and downward, so that his feet came up off the floor from his own momentum and he crashed down flat with an impact that shook the rafters. Katie was in motion, too, moving to meet either the Filinbanc or his adversary, and Green Girl jerked around, let out a screech, and swung her broadsword in a vicious arc; Katie ducked, and the blade opened the chest of a Torusch who’d been coming up behind her. Katie snatched up a table and heaved it at the swordswoman, who likewise skipped out of the way, and the table bowled over three Groeltisch who had been crowding toward the action; the flaming drinks the Groeltisch had been carrying splashed blobs of fire on the patrons around _them,_ and as instantly as if someone had flipped a switch, the entire place exploded into an all-out brawl.

Now, here’s the biggest difference between me and Merl: I’m as big on self-preservation as he is, staying alive is genuinely my most favorite thing ever, but I don’t keep it front-and-center in my thinking every single moment, it serves as a _foundation_ while I focus on other imperatives. So, while Merl jittered in my grip, clearly yearning to make a dash for the nearest exit, I was looking around for opportunity rather than escape. “Stick with me,” I told him. “I think I can make us a nice score out of this situation.”

“No frickin’ _way,_ man!” He wasn’t quite fighting me, he knew better than that, but he was about to explode with the need to get far away from here. “Let me go!”

“Okay, then, wait for me right outside,” I urged him, already in motion as the play I had been contemplating came together in my mind.

Demons are dangerous, no two ways about it, but they’re a great deal less dangerous to people who 1) know they exist and 2) never forget that they’re _demons,_ not just funny-shaped people with unusual behaviors. There’s already a self-selection process in place, the types that come to a demon bar are naturally more sociable and less volatile than most others, and I truly do know quite a bit about one-on-one combat, so jumping out into the middle of the fray really wasn’t as crazy or as brave as it might have seemed. I could make it _look_ that way, though, and set out to do exactly that.

I had a few small items on me that could be useful in an individual scrap, but the current rumble went beyond that, so I did the same. There were a half-dozen stanchions set back against one wall, for what purpose I couldn’t guess (sectioning off semi-private parties of species that needed to be kept separate, maybe), and I grabbed up one of those, unclipped it from the velvet rope that connected it to the others, and then waded into the scuffle. As an impromptu melee weapon, the stanchion had its advantages; the broad base could be used as a shield, the pole for close-in blocks and jabs, and the whole thing was heavy enough to swing as a makeshift bludgeon if need be. I wasn’t really concerned with beating anybody, though, just protecting myself and looking manly and daring while I did it. Not that I was faking anything, this was serious business, and it took a solid measure of my speed and skill and craft, I was just focused on not-losing instead of on winning. I worked my way through the brawling forms around me, moving fast and keeping my moves economical and tight, maneuvering over toward where I could see Katie fighting.

I wouldn’t have thought that filmy scarf-vest of hers capable of concealing anything larger than a hatpin, but she had produced a pair of butterfly swords from somewhere and wielded them with a flat, matter-of-fact finesse considerably more alarming than any flashy show-off display would have been. She was moving so quickly and dealing out so much damage that it took me a few seconds to see that there was little if any killing; she used the foreguards of the short swords to punch as if with brass knuckles, the crossguards for trapping along the unsharpened back half of the blades, the heavy hilts for side-hand strikes, and the blades themselves only against anyone who thought grappling with her might be a good idea (it truly wasn’t). This was not someone scared of a fight, nor spoiling for one; no, if a fight came along she saw it as a _job,_ and set herself to do it right.

I picked my moment, came in at just the right angle, yelled _“Look out!”_, and smacked the base of the stanchion against the head of a Qart‘araf who was trying to edge around the fracas and get to the front door for a strategic departure. Qart‘araf are fairly brawny, and somewhat more intelligent than most, but not exceptionally tough, plus I’d caught him from behind. He went tumbling past Katie, I’d picked one who wasn’t in her direct vision so as far as she knew he _might_ have been trying to come in on her blind side, and then I was beside her, doing a complicated sweep-and-guide to take the legs out from under a Lei-ach pair who had been hanging back and watching for an opportunity. “Hey,” I called to her, sweaty and grinning, projecting what should be the perfect balance of reckless, devil-may-care bravery. “Come here often?”

There’s always a chance to learn something new, and now I learned that a Slayer could roll her eyes without actually taking them off everything going on around her. “Give me a break,” she said, used a foreguard punch to shatter the teeth of a Carnyss demon, then yelled, “Break and exfil! Chop-chop, stat, _now!”_

I was fine with that, I’d been about to suggest it myself (fighting at her side was less about fighting than about _being seen doing so,_ and I’d accomplished that), so we smashed our way through the chittering, bellowing, snarling mob around us, with me laying about more extravagantly now that I had a Slayer next to me. We were already near the door — Katie must have been moving that way already — and in seconds we were to it, and I was about to do a cheesy _After you, milady_ quip when Katie stopped, and I looked around to see why, and —

— and Green Girl was coming our way. Her sword was up and smeared with various hues of blood and ichor, she’d lost the yellow glasses and her hair was wild and her eyes wilder, and she gave every appearance of being several long steps past totally pissed off. Though my reaction was immediate, it was also deliberate choice, stepping forward instead of back and leveling the shielding base of the stanchion … but it was a forward _angle,_ putting me a bit to one side of Katie even as I appeared to be moving up to protect her, and with my off-hand I reached under my jacket for the taser in the inside pocket.

(No, I wasn’t sacrificing Katie to save myself, not that I was past doing that if I’d needed to; she was unquestionably better qualified to face a demonic warrioress than I would ever be. As at every moment since the first blow was struck, I was still looking to make myself appear an ally worth standing by, and the taser would be a handy surprise if Katie _did_ have any trouble. I’m not a bad guy, not even heartless, I just always make sure to put myself first. If people get snippy about that kind of thing, well, that’s just further proof that they’re not willing to face reality.)

Katie did a complex double-hand whirl of the butterfly swords, but instead of bringing them up to guard she slotted them into hip-level sheaths that angled behind her back, the scarf-vest more opaque at that section than it had appeared to be. “About time,” she declared. “Watch Wonder Boy here, I’m scouting ahead to make sure nobody got out ahead of us and decided to wait in ambush.” And she wheeled and was out the door while I was still gaping.

“Go on, get moving,” Green Girl ordered me. “I’m _her_ rear-guard, too, not just yours.” She shot a quick glance behind her, then back to me with a sudden fierceness on a face that was, I realized, a lot more delicately pretty than it had appeared under the fuzzy light around the bar. “Move it, I said!”

So I moved, feeling out of my depth for the first time in a very long time.

Yeah. Slayers have that kind of effect. Even on me.

Always have.

* * *

We were half a block from the front entrance to Del’s, just as a safety buffer, before Katie stopped. “So,” she said, turning to Green Girl. “Did he give any signals when my back was to him?”

“I didn’t see anything,” GG answered. “In fact, he was mostly turned away from you, I guess hoping that little extra would keep you from hearing him. And it looked like he really was surprised when a fight kicked off.” She glanced at me, those unsettling eyes — solid black, no iris or pupil — still projecting _alien!_ even though her voice was pure suburban teenage girl. “He reacted really quick, though, so _maybe_ he knew it was coming, but I don’t think so.” She shrugged disdainfully. “Which doesn’t mean I’m saying we can trust him.”

“And it doesn’t sound like she does,” I threw in genially. (Not a big fan of being talked about like I’m not there.) “Which is smart, but could cost us time right now. It turns out I actually might be able to help with that little item you were asking about, only it’s not something that can wait till next week.”

Katie gave me a hard look, and I was finally able to clarify what I’d been picking up from the beginning. This wasn’t professional skepticism, she was reacting to me personally. Which meant she’d dealt with somebody like me before — probably not at my level, but someone who knew how to use charm to best effect — and now responded to those cues with reflexive cynicism. Not because I dealt with demons: because I was ME.

Still, she spoke evenly enough. “Okay, so what’ve you got?”

I laughed, turned toward what I figured was the most likely patch of concealing shadow. “Hey, MBart,” I called (whoops, almost slipped there, “you in earshot?”

I’d judged it pretty close, he emerged from the _second_ most likely dark spot, casting nervous glances back toward Del’s. “Yeah, yeah,” he groused as he came up close to us. “Just can’t figure why you want to hang around with the Wrecking Crew here.”

He actually had a point, though he’d been characteristically surly about it. I was about to chide him for manners, but Katie looked over at the other Slayer and said, “Ari, what _did_ set off all that ruckus?”

‘Ari’ nodded like she’d been expecting the question. “The Filinbanc,” she said. “You couldn’t spot it from where you were, but before I moved up so he’d have to go past me, I could see his dorsal spines starting to tighten out. Then, about the time I got into position, he muttered something about blood debt and set himself to go for you, so I cut him right off.”

Katie thought about it. “Don’t remember tangling with any Filinbanc before,” she mused. “I guess it was just against Slayers in general.” Then she gave Ari a sharp look. “Wait: you speak their language?”

Ari shook her head. “No, but —” She spread her hands in a low shrug, like _YOU know._

“Oh, yeah,” Katie said, nodding. “Right.”

“It didn’t stop with the Filinbanc, though,” I noted. “What about the others?”

Katie waved it away. “They were all keyed up, I could see that myself. Anything could’ve set ’em off, and something did.” Then, to Ari, “How’s your night vision in those things?”

“Maybe eighty per cent,” Ari reported. “Take ’em out?”

Katie nodded. “Time to be moving on anyway.” Then she turned back to me. “So you say you may have something to offer us?”

“It’s a possibility,” I began … then broke off, because Ari had inserted a thumbnail into the corner of each eye and peeled away the black outer layer, an unexpectedly disturbing sight. “What the _hell?”_

Katie glanced back at Ari, grinned at me. “Sclera lenses, soft contacts,” she explained, obviously enjoying my startlement. “Handy for costumes.”

And for allowing a Slayer some unsuspected backup. “Fine,” I said. “Well, Bart and I compared notes, and the setup you described sounds a lot like a guy we know about. At least enough to be worth checking out.” I gave a regretful sigh. “Thing is, he doesn’t like us very much, and I’d bet he isn’t crazy about Slayers, either, so he’s probably not too open to a friendly approach.”

Katie was giving me that look again, the one that told me she automatically distrusted whatever came out of my mouth. “So, basically, you don’t really have anything to offer us.” She took an oh-so-casual stance. “Except maybe a name. I’d kind of like to hear the name.”

I laughed a little. “I’m fine with giving you the name, but Bart and I _might_ be able to get you a look at some of his private files.”

Still unimpressed, suspicious. “And why would you do that?”

“Two reasons,” I told her. “First, it could be useful to have a Slayer owe me a favor, or to have _all_ the Slayers know I’m a guy who can deliver on a deal.” I shrugged. “Second, I’ve tried a few times to negotiate with this guy Cholk — that’s the name you wanted — and he was too snooty to deal with the likes of me, so I don’t mind the idea of seeing him take a small loss, even if it’s one he never knows about.”

“And that’s it?” Katie studied me, shook her head. “No, guys like you always have an angle.” She looked to Ari. “Cholk. We can check that out, assuming it’s the truth. We’re done here.”

She started to turn away, and I stepped forward. “No, think about it, some of this stuff has an expiration date.” She was still turning, and I reached for her …

I just meant to touch her on the shoulder, I _know_ better than to grab a Slayer. Ari was right there, though, taking a grip on my wrist that clearly could have crushed it with just a minor expenditure of extra effort, and saying, “Hold it right there, fella —”

And then something happened. I saw it happen, saw her face go still and felt her body do the same. Not just my own impression, Katie heard/felt it too and swung back around, the butterfly swords out, and Merl hissed and backed away and Ari held up a hand to forestall her sister Slayer. We stayed like that for a moment, Ari staring at me with an expression I couldn’t begin to interpret … then she let go of my wrist and said to Katie, “We need to talk.” Katie’s eyebrows went up, and Ari said, _“Now.”_

Katie put away the swords again, but her body language was still wary. With a quick glance my way, she said briskly, “Stay.” Then she and Ari crossed to a spot out about eighty feet away, just past the beginning of a medium-sized plaza, and the two Slayers settled in for a quick conference.

Merl was practically vibrating. “Oh, man,” he moaned. “This is bad, this is _bad_. She’s actin’ just like Tiffi always did when she got a hit, and the whole prophecy bit is never good. I don’t want to _be_ here.”

I didn’t entirely agree with him, but I couldn’t really argue, either. Something was going on here, and I didn’t know quite what it was but I knew I didn’t like it … or, maybe, didn’t like not-knowing. ‘Tiffi’ had to mean Madame Tiphaine (mark that one down, I hadn’t known Merl had ever met her), and this was indeed the way she reacted when something manifested big enough that she didn’t have time to hide the signs. All the same, there was no way he could be right about what he was thinking. The Slayer package came with a kind of built-in quasi-prophecy, but it wasn’t of the same quality as what a genuine seer could get, and didn’t operate the same way. The kind of touch-flash it looked like Ari had just caught, Slayers didn’t _do_ that, so it had to be something else. That much was plain fact, but knowing what it wasn’t didn’t mean I had any idea what it was.

I needed to find out what was going on. And there was a way I might be able to do that quickly, but it was going to cost me.

“Keep still and keep quiet,” I told Merl, pretty much the same way Katie had ordered me to stay where I was. If I was going to do this, I needed to avoid any distractions that might turn the cost into a waste. Merl’s eyes went hooded but also flat; so many of his mannerisms were so similar to those of a certain human type, I kept reminding myself he _wasn’t_ human, and likewise kept forgetting and being startled a bit when I was reminded again. Still, it appeared he was going to follow instructions, so I settled my breathing, hooked a thumb into my left pants pocket to brush against the irregular stone there, internally vocalized the activation _cthoon_, and split/floated to where the two girls were maybe a minute into their private confab.

It was something like those drones the Army was using in Afghanistan and Iraq, only mystical instead of mechanical (or even physical), and theoretically undetectable, and maybe using just a smidge of my life-energy but I was accustomed to making these small trade-offs. It wasn’t like a spy-platform, either, a part of me was actually _there,_ seeing and hearing and (if I tuned in on that aspect) even smelling what I wasn’t corporeally present to sense. A year ago I’d picked up a dozen iterations of this particular projection type, and had gone through four of them already — this made five — and I didn’t want to expend them all without proper reward but sometimes you just have to take a chance.

I arrived in time to catch Katie in mid-sentence. “–son Dubois,” she said. “I know what kind of juice she carries, and I know you got some of the same from her. I’m not waving that off, believe me. But —” She looked back to where my half-occupied body was standing with Merl. _“That_ guy? Seriously?”

“Look, I know what he is —” Ari began.

Katie cut her off. “Do you? I doubt it. I’ve seen his kind before, and you _can’t_ know unless you’ve lived through it. Mix that personality type with demons …” She grimaced, shook her head. “You ever hear any of the stories about somebody named Ethan Rayne? or Warren Mears? ’Cause I’m telling you, this character is halfway to being another just like that.”

“I know,” Ari said. “He could go either way, and _now_ is when it happens. Please, if you’ll just believe in this —”

Merl sneezed, hard, and the explosive reverberations between realhearing_there_ and ghosthearing_here_ rattled me like dice in a cup. Damn it, I should have had at least a couple of minutes, I couldn’t leave now! I held on with a stubborn effort of will, squandering psychic energy already in short supply; pulled myself away from the disruption, steadied, and wrenched myself back into focus.

“–ther Robin or Mateo,” Ari was saying. “Maybe even another Xan–…” I lost it again, an aftershock, hugely less severe than the first blast but enough to un-tune me for a few seconds, and then I was in again. “— have to leave it to me,” Ari said. “I can _feel_ this, I can follow the line and guide it right, and there’s just no way I can tell you how important this all could be!”

Katie sighed heavily. “You’d better know what you’re doing, Ariel.” Even my fading parasenses could hear the unwilling surrender. “If you think I’m about to go clear back to Phoenix to deliver any bad news to that mother of yours, you’re nuts.”

(Phoenix. Okay. So, Katie from Cali and Ari from Arizona.)

“Thank you,” Ari said. _“Thank you._ I’ll make it work, I promise.”

“You’d better,” Katie groused. “Because you’re asking for a crap-load of trust here —” And then I was done, yanked back into my body as abruptly as a tennis ball bulleted across the net.

I’d picked up some of what I needed, maybe enough, but I still gave Merl a slit-eyed glare. “What part of ‘still and quiet’ did you not understand?”

He scowled, not remotely as intimidated as I preferred; might have to give that some attention. “Friggin’ gnat flew straight up my nose,” he said without apology. “ ’Sides, what d’you care? You were so zoned out, I expected you to start drooling.”

There was no time to work him back into the shape that suited me, but I’d have to find the time soon if I wanted to preserve our normal working relationship. I had to settle for “Don’t think what you see is all there is,” because the two girls were making their way back over to us. I turned away from Merl, waited.

“No margin,” Katie said to Ari as they came to where we were standing. “No chances. I mean it.” She stopped in front of us, that ridiculously perky Barbie’s-kid-sister face set in a warning glower. “Okay, Ari thinks this is something that needs to be followed out. Me, still not convinced. I’m gonna let her run with it, see how she does solo on something low-level.” She stepped closer, her face a half-inch from mine, voice barely above a whisper. “Anything happens to her, it won’t be just me coming for you. There’ll be a dozen of us, and you’ll be _hoping_ I’m the one who finds you first.”

I smiled, but it was a _Don’t worry_ smile, not anything that might come across as smart-ass. “I’m not looking to hurt her,” I reassured Katie, “and I’m _definitely_ not wanting to be on any Slayer most-wanted list. I’ll behave; even if you don’t trust my good nature, believe in my dedication to staying alive.” I gave her a quizzical side-glance. “Solo … you’re not going to be in on this? It started out as your issue, as I recall.”

“She asked very nicely,” Katie told me, clipped and flat. Then she sighed. “Yeah, the thing matters to me. Some. Ari matters more. She wants a chance to operate on her own, I’ll give it to her.” She looked back to the other girl, and told her, “You’ve got your cell. Call me if you need anything. _Anything.”_

“I will,” Ari said to her. “I promise.”


	3. Chapter 3

“You’re a good person,” Ari — Ariel — assured me earnestly.

I smiled to her. “Don’t know if I’d go that far,” I said to her. “I mean, I try not to be a _bad_ guy, but …” Shrug, disarming grin.

“No,” she said, shaking her head in insistent dismissal. “You keep working the whole ‘charming rogue’ deal, but your heart is where it needs to be. I can tell.”

This had started shortly after Katie grudgingly separated from us, and Ariel, Merl and I had embarked on the first step to raiding Cholk’s holdings. It was a little funny, a little sad, and gradually becoming a little annoying. Was she trying to convince me, or herself? It bothered me mainly because I couldn’t figure where she was coming from. I’m _good_ with women, really good, better at it than some magic-users are at their own specialties, and all my skills were telling me this wasn’t infatuation or puppy love or even hero worship. It was as if the girl had some overriding need to believe the best of me, or maybe to persuade me to believe it.

(And she was definitely a girl. Slayers are impressive, even frightening creatures, but much of that comes from seeing such power and ferocity unleashed from such a slight, non-fearsome frame. I’d run across a few Slayers over the years, and avoided them when I could; this was my first opportunity to observe one close-up and at length. Katie, I think, had looked quite a bit younger than she really was. Ariel, who had seemed roughly contemporary to her, might actually be _younger_ than she appeared. Fifteen? fourteen? I hadn’t dealt with that age cohort since I was fifteen myself, and it was threatening to throw me off my stride.)

“Lucky for us, it doesn’t matter,” I said in reply to her last comment. “What we’re at now, I don’t have to be a nice person as long as I know what I’m doing.” I looked to Merl. “Ready to do your deal, big guy?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, voice and expression sour. “ ’Cept, you got your own reasons for doing this, including buildin’ up credit with the hack-and-kill crowd. What’s _my_ payoff?”

I answered that with a wide shrug, palms out and upward. “C’mon, now, when have I ever let you down? You know I’ll settle up, if only because I’ll probably need something else from you later.” I shot Ariel a smile, but the follow-up was to both of them. “Free enterprise is what makes the world go ’round.”

Ariel looked away from me. “I never said you were _nice,”_ she murmured, so softly that maybe I genuinely wasn’t supposed to hear it.

Merl grumbled to himself, almost as inaudibly, and inspected the bars in front of us with his habitual sneer. Cholk’s high-rise had lobby security which would never approve us, but service exits were another matter. This one was closed off by a steel cage, and the gate release was on the other side of the inner door. Basic measures, but sufficient for most.

We weren’t ‘most’. Merl, a professional thief, sneak, snitch, and all-around pain in the ass. A Slayer, the killing power of a dozen ninjas packed into a hundred-some pounds of barely-postpubescent female. Even I, technically the ‘normal’ one of the bunch, do have a small collection of rather unconventional skills.

The bars were set four and a half, five inches apart. Merl shed the hoodie he had used to conceal his outré appearance while we penetrated into the outer edges of uptown, then squeezed his arm and shoulder into the gap between bars, wriggling and pushing till his head and ribcage were pressed up against the unyielding metal. He stayed there for a bit, shifting and grunting now and then, and gradually he was further and further in until, with a last hissing tug, he was completely through.

He can’t _completely_ disarticulate his skeleton, but there’s a lot of give in there, which doubtless had a great deal to do with his choice of profession. I understand the skull sutures and the pelvic joins are the hardest for him to sufficiently relax … but I don’t actually care, as long as he can do what I need done.

The door itself was also locked, but Merl squatted in front of it and addressed the lockplate with muttered complaints and some small tools which he might have custom-designed or might have picked up from the same place where ordinary human burglars acquired theirs; again, not caring. While he worked, I glanced over at Ariel and observed, “I can’t help noticing you changed your attitude awfully quick.” She looked back at me, startled, and I explained, “When it was just me and you and Katie, you were all tough-girl scowly suspicion. The moment she was gone, you started treating me like some kind of tortured antihero who just needs to be understood. It was a _very_ sudden transition.”

Ariel waved that off, almost angrily. “Katie thinks she has to watch out for me,” she said. “Thinks I’m naïve and gullible. Well, I wasn’t even before I got the Slayer call, and for darn sure not now.” She sighed. “So I put on an act for her, and even if she doesn’t buy it she at least knows I’m paying attention. Right now, I don’t have any need to pretend.”

“And it’s a relief to not have you accusing me of planning a double-cross every few minutes,” I said amiably. “All the same, don’t be getting your hopes up. I’ll play straight with you, but I don’t need redemption and I don’t want it.” I kept my tone mild, but my eyes stayed on hers. “I picked out this life for myself, for reasons of my own. I’m good at it and getting better, and I do it because I like it. Bottom line, I chose this.”

Her mouth had been getting tighter while I spoke, but she visibly shook it off now. “You don’t make a choice once,” she told me. “You do it every day. So every day you might want to check and be sure this is still what you want.” She looked away again. “Or who you want to be.”

I was spared from having to find an answer for that, because Merl announced, “Got it!” He looked back, eyeing us sardonically. “Oh — sorry if I interrupted the mating dance.”

Ariel flushed at the unexpected dig, and I hid my own reaction. Yes, I was definitely going to have to perform some attitude adjustment on Merl. After the job was done, though … and after I had paid him, because business was still business.

Once he had the door open, Merl freed the gate and Ariel and I went inside. He put the hoodie back on; similarly, Ariel had removed the most noticeable portions of her demon/warrior/woman getup before starting out with us, and had even passed over the broadsword to Katie in return for less obtrusive weapons, which she now carried in a trendy backpack. (She had also shed the misleading shoes, without which she turned out to be only about five-feet-five.) I watched for cameras as we started up the stairwell, didn’t see any, but still we acted like people engaged in animated conversation rather than perpetrating any kind of stealth penetration. Invisibility is overrated; much easier, and just about as effective, is if people see you and still don’t care because you look familiar enough to be disregarded.

Cholk’s digs were on the eighth floor; we could have hoofed it the whole way, but that might actually have attracted notice, so we emerged on the third floor and took the elevator the remaining distance. Ariel had pulled a paperback from her backpack (_the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy_, I noted with some amusement), and harangued us with gestures and body language, pointing dramatically to selected passages, while I nodded indulgently and Merl, head down in the hoodie, made _Yeah, yeah_ hand-motions. All of us continuing to perform for the camera we were certain would be in the elevator car, though I still hadn’t spotted it. “Totally different way of seeing reality,” Ariel was declaiming. “The cosmology, wow, it’s just so _cosmic —”_ She paused, glanced at me. “I just can’t get into it,” she admitted to me. “Everybody says how funny it is, but my idea of funny must be something else.” Then her voice went up again in fangirl gushing: “And omigod the twists, there’s a twist _every time you turn around —”_

Mercifully, we hit our destination about that time, and exited the car, and Ariel cut off her exposition and returned the book to the backpack. “Are you sure of the location?” she asked me as we headed down the hallway.

“Yep, scouted it enough times. Not worth the risk, not then, but I like to have contingency plans worked up in case things change.” We reached the main door of the suite at the end. “This one,” I said. “Still unoccupied, renovations scheduled through the middle of next month.”

“Right.” Ariel tried the door, but as expected it was locked. (Still, you always want to try; I mean, you never know, right?) She looked at Merl. “How long for something like this?” she asked.

Merl shook his head. “I can work my way through most non-electronic stuff,” he said, “but I’m no wizard. Answer is ‘Too long’, not exposed out here like this.”

Ariel nodded, sighed, took hold of the doorknob with both hands and put one booted foot up against the wall next to the door, and pulled with steadily increasing pressure. There was a groan of stressed metal as the lock facing began to give, then a sharp snap as the bolt itself broke. “Don’t like destroying private property,” she observed regretfully, lowering the bracing foot to stand normally. “I’ll have to see if we can send something anonymous to cover repair costs.” She gave me a glance. “Operational necessity or not, I’m still responsible.”

Fine, I had noted the moral lesson. We slid inside, and she pushed the door closed and set a small table against it to hold it in place, since that door was _not_ going to function normally again till somebody replaced a few key parts. We looked around to get our bearings; our only illumination was outside city lights seeping in through the windows, but I was seeing less equipment and mess than expected; maybe ‘the middle of next month’ hadn’t been written in stone. “Balcony,” I said, gesturing toward the wall-to-wall windows at the end. “Next to that, there’s a ledge running around the corner to the balcony on Cholk’s side: ten, twelve, maybe fourteen feet. No fun for anybody with acrophobia, but manageable.”

Merl shook his head and made a small sound that was part laugh and part huff of derision. “Yeah, well, I’ll wait here,” he said. “I’m not about to go out wall-walkin’.”

I laughed at that. _“You’re_ afraid of a little second-story work?”

“More’n second-story,” he answered, glaring. “And no, not scared, it just friggin’ _hurts.”_

“Never mind,” Ariel interrupted us. “I have rope, I’ll go first and set it into place and then you can both come around using that.”

A safety line would certainly be welcome; I’ve done chancier things than a little building-side walkabout, but why take risks you don’t need to? We went out onto the balcony, Ariel pulled out the promised rope on a flat plastic spindle (yellow nylon, not the best choice for grip or tensile strength, but should be adequate), secured one end to the railing, then strolled out down the ledge and around the corner. Forty seconds later she was back at the corner, holding the line but not really relying on it. “I made sure to leave enough slack to give you room,” she said. “Stay on the inside, hold on, walk normally, shouldn’t be any problems.”

I smiled at Merl. “See? All safe now.”

“Screw the botha ya,” Merl snarled, but he went on ahead of me and I followed, and we were on Cholk’s balcony in no time.

The lights were on inside, which normally would have been unwelcome but in this case was actually essential. “I hope he doesn’t have much company,” Ariel said with a little frown.

“Cholk’s a kinda private guy,” I assured her. “He doesn’t do parties, just female guests. One at a time, every other Friday, different woman every time.” I smiled. “Very regular. Almost a ritual, you might say.”

Ariel gave me a sharp look. “Ritual … do you mean sacrifices?”

Merl gave a little sneering laugh, but I just held the smile that was already there. “I suppose you could call it a sacrifice, but the woman involved is the one making it.” Ariel regarded me quizzically, and I explained, “Think less ‘dark altar’ and more ‘casting couch’.”

That took her back a bit, but only a bit. “Seriously?”

“Cholk’s solidly integrated with the human community,” I told her. “He has operations in a lot of areas, and he’s built up a fair amount of influence. He’s in a position to offer favors, and he does … if he gets the right favor in return.”

Slayer or not, she was still really young, and she couldn’t keep the revulsion from showing. “That’s disgusting,” she said.

“That’s a voluntary exchange of services,” I corrected her. “You may not like it, but then you’re not the one doing it.” I stepped up to the glass of the sliding doors, peered through the gauzy curtains behind them. The light inside, and dark on our side, made an effective screen. “Nope, don’t see any guests, and Cholk’s settled in front of the TV. Either he skipped this week’s appointment — which I doubt, because like I said he’s a creature of habit — or he’s still waiting for her to arrive. So that gives us a window of opportunity, which we need to use while it lasts.”

“Tell me again why we need this, this whatever,” Ariel prompted me.

I’d picked up enough by now to know she was sharp and attentive, so she hadn’t forgotten and she wasn’t having trouble understanding. She just wanted to see if I kept telling the same story. Fine, I could indulge her. “Lots of demons _have_ magic,” I said to her, “but not many _use_ magic. Cholk’s like most in that area, he’d rather work with things than spells, that’s why we don’t have to worry about any mystical alarms here. — And yes, I’ve checked, several times while I was scouting things out. His offices, though, he’s got wards in the places we’ll need to get to if we want to see his files, and he keeps a token that’ll let him pass without breaking the wards, and also alerts him if anybody else goes in.” I nodded toward the lit suite beyond the door. “That’ll be in there somewhere: something small and convenient, something he can keep on his person, probably set aside in a handy spot till he goes back in tomorrow, like putting your keys in a little bowl by the door when you get home.” I chuckled. “Not very likely he’ll still be wearing it when his ‘entertainment’ shows up, so this is our chance to snag a free pass into his private offices. And the idea is to do it without him knowing about it, so —” I turned to Merl. “That means you’re on deck.”

His lips curled … no, not lips, that scaly face doesn’t have any, but the effect was the same. _“This_ is what you brought me here for? Nuh-uh, too chancy for my blood.”

I sighed. “Merl. I told you I’d pay, and I will. The more you do for me, the more you get. The _less_ you do, on the other hand …” I shrugged, letting it hang.

He shook his head. “I’ve had to bug outta the last two towns where I set up, just ’cause things got too hot. I don’t _like_ livin’ from a suitcase. Traveling, sure, that’s fine, long as I got some place to come home to.” He gestured toward the lit interior. “I fall crosswise’a Cholk, I gotta pull up stakes again, and that’s _if_ I survive. So no.”

My usual good humor isn’t an act, I’m basically an easy-going guy, and I enjoy the life I’m building for myself. This was beginning to wear on my basic nature, though. Keeping control, I said patiently, “This is a sneak, buddy. That’s _you._ Nobody does it better, you know that. You don’t carry your share, though, you’re dead weight, which pretty much just means a little gratuity for getting us into the building. You want more than that, you have to work with me here.”

That one struck home: at the warning of reduced payola, Merl dithered so hard he was almost vibrating, greed warring with his natural hypercaution. Then a crafty look stole over his face (it’s unsettling how features so unhuman can reproduce human expressions), and said, “There’s only one way I go in. I’ll work my specialty — and yeah, I got the odds with me, I’m that good — but if Cholk happens to spot me and I let out a yell, _she_ has to run in and kill him so I don’t get hit with any backsplash.”

It wasn’t a feather-duster Ariel had been swinging back at Del’s, so I knew she had no problem killing in combat, but she might consider this to be a different matter. I eyed her with some uncertainty, and saw with relief that she was weighing the issue rather than recoiling from it. “No,” she decided. “If he’s integrated, if he isn’t doing anything that _makes_ him a target, I don’t want to be messing up the balances around here.” She glanced inside. “We’ve learned that the hard way: too much risk it turns into local war, different groups and contenders pushing in to try and fill the vacuum. So no, I won’t make any promise like that.”

Merl shook his head again in hard negation. “Then you can forget about me stickin’ my neck out.”

I was about ready to break said neck, but Ariel just shrugged. “No problem, I’ll go in myself.” We both must have looked doubtful (thunderstruck, in my case), because she surveyed us both and said, “What? I might not be as good at it as him —” She hooked a thumb at Merl. “— but I’ll bet I can be sneaky _enough._ And if your guy does happen to see me, so what? I’ll just run out too fast for him to stop me, because I don’t have to worry about being recognized.”

“That’s …” I fumbled for words, this new turn had taken me off-guard. “Look, I’m not being patronizing, I know I’m a lot more likely to need _you_ protecting _me_ than the other way around. But we know the ground here, we know the type of thing we’ll be looking for. How will you find it? how will you recognize it? how can you be sure you get the right little mystical token and not something else that looks about right but just isn’t the one we need?”

She smiled at that, slipping off the backpack and setting it aside, divesting herself of weapons except for a knife with a seven-inch double-edged blade. “Don’t worry about that,” she said cheerfully. “My mom says I’m really intuitive. Tells me I get it from her side of the family.” And, before we could voice (or think of) any other objections, she slid open the glass door just enough to ease through, moving it noiselessly back once she had passed, and shifted out of our view … and, hopefully, Cholk’s as well, though his attention still seemed to be on the television.

Merl gave me a slit-pupiled glance. “Brother, do you know how to pick ’em.”

I hadn’t exactly picked this, I was just trying to work with the opportunity that had presented itself. All the same, I knew what he meant. “For the record,” I observed, “that’s twice in a row she’s stepped in when you opted out. You might not want to let that turn into a streak.”

He didn’t answer, and we settled in to wait. And wait. When Merl does a sneak, you can wait hours (though I wouldn’t have expected that for a place this small), because he’ll move one muscle at a time, totally silent and creeping at roughly snail speed, and I swear he must have some kind of internal Zen thing that diverts attention away from him because he can pass through conditions where you’d think it was impossible for him to not be noticed. When he isn’t the one on the line, though, his patience is sharply more limited. He hugged his arms around himself, stomped his feet (but still lightly enough that the noise wouldn’t carry past the glass door), and muttered, “Hope your chickie gets lucky. I’m freezin’ my cloaca off up here.”

He was exaggerating, of course, carping for the pure sake of being Merl. There was a brisk breeze at this elevation, but hardly anything to complain about. Still, complaining was Merl’s principal pleasure in life. “Stress kills, my friend. You need to focus on calming thoughts. Like money.”

“Dreamin’ about money’s good,” he agreed. “Holding it’s better.”

We were just passing time, really. I wasn’t truly worried about Ariel (Cholk would’ve needed half a dozen top-notch bodyguards in there — which he didn’t have — to even begin to pose a threat to her), and Merl simply didn’t care about anybody besides himself. My current imperatives have given me a lot of practice in allowing however much time is necessary to accomplish whatever needs done, and I’ve learned to let the time just slide through me, but we were in fact dealing with a deadline: the amount of time it would take us to reach, and then penetrate, our target’s main offices once we were done here and had the necessary gate key. And I hoped Ariel was right about how intuitive she was. She’d seemed confident enough, but confidence can also come from ignorance, and — reminding myself again — she _was_ very, very young …

A shadow appeared behind the curtain; I stepped back involuntarily, and Merl actually jumped. Then the glass door moved open and Ariel slithered through, again closing it immediately behind her. “Sorry,” she said, “that took longer than I expected, he had a small collection of things that gave off very weird vibes. Distracting. I think this one is what we want, though.” She held up a small ridged object, roughly the size and shape of the end of my thumb, dangling from a loop of silver wire big enough for someone Cholk’s size to pass it over his head and wear it around his neck.

I’d have to test it to be sure (and the only definitive test would be to try it against Cholk’s security), but it matched what I knew of such things, and her assurance was so total as to be almost impossible to doubt. I was starting to get some weird vibes myself: she’d been inside for barely twelve minutes. Even for a Slayer, this was not natural.

I shook it away. “All right, then,” I said. “I’d say that puts us a bit ahead of schedule, which is good. So, back over and out and down.” I glanced at where the yellow rope was secured to the balcony rail. “We’ll want to take that with us.”

Ariel nodded. “Oh, sure. You two go ahead, then I’ll untie this end and come after you.” Which is what we did.

This had all gone _very_ smoothly … which, yes, worried me a bit. Not in a superstitious way, more a recognition that this wasn’t the way things normally proceeded, and the resulting suspicion that something was going on that I might not care for. I didn’t see the likelihood of any plot being run against me, though; if anything, my private eavesdropping over Ariel and Katie made it seem she had a disproportionate (and misplaced) concern for my welfare. Still, there was the sense of _something_ going on, which still left me a bit edgy, though I was careful to hide it.

At least, that was the intention. We took the elevator down to the main lobby, since we were less concerned about being seen leaving — going out meant we’d already been in, which meant we must have been approved for entry, right? — and were almost to the ground floor when Ariel looked over to me and said, “You don’t have to worry about me. I’m on your side … more, maybe, than _you_ are.”

Again with this. I don’t like being read, or maybe just hit with a lucky guess, but I still maintained control. “Look, you seem to think I’m Han Solo, all crusty and pretend-cynical but I’ll swoop back in and save the day when the chips are down.” I shook my head. “Well, I _am_ Solo, according to my lights, but I always thought him going back after he had his reward was a sucker move that Lucas threw in as a crowd-pleaser. Guys like him, guys like me, that’s not how we roll.” I was surprised at how much I wanted to convince her. Fixing my eyes on hers, but keeping my voice even and unbelligerent, I said, “I’m following out my own plan. That doesn’t put me against you, but it isn’t any redemption arc, either. Redemption doesn’t fit me, because I’m already moving in the direction I want to go.”

“You think you are,” she answered. “Maybe you aren’t. Or maybe you _are,_ but it isn’t what you should be wanting.”

Okay, I had tried, and even that much was enough unlike me to be out of character. (Han having doubts? Nope, not happening.) The elevator _ding!_ed and the doors opened, and we went out with Ariel and me between Merl and the line of sight of the tie-and-blazered guard at the reception desk, all three of us bearing toward the set of exit doors that would take us farthest from him and still maintaining the appearance of preoccupied conversation. (Ariel again talking about _Hitchhiker_, me tossing in periodic _Yeah, sure, whatever,_ and Merl grumbling, “You better spring for a cab, pal, ’cause I _know_ how far we gotta go on this next leg.”)

We were there, we were all but outside, and then Ariel halted stock-still where she was. I would have asked why, but I had seen it, too: a young woman had come in the rightmost doors (we were at the leftmost), and she was definitely Cholk’s type: under the age of twenty-five, attractive without being stunning, just the right impression of farm-girl innocence trying to make it in the big city … she wore an inexpensive but well-cut tailored suit of the type that ambitious would-be female executives adopt as the proper uniform for climbing the ladder, but the heels were just a bit too high for your normal business meeting, and she clutched a stylish little purse instead of the usual stylish trim briefcase.

I had taken in the details in the first moment, but was still assessing the picture when Ariel whispered, “Oh, God.” I studied her sharply; she turned panic-stricken eyes on me, grabbed my sleeve beseechingly. “Stop her. Please, you have to _stop_ her.” She shook herself as if unseen things were crawling on her. “She’s given up, there’s nothing there, she’s _dead_ inside. Stop her, please, before —” Then she cut off as if she could no longer make her tongue work.

This wasn’t an act, I knew that much, but that didn’t mean I had the least idea what was going on. I started to ask, “What are you —?”, but she silently mouthed, **_PLEASE!_**, with such force that I was actually moving before I had made the decision.

Crap, why was I doing this? But I was doing it, and I had reached the young woman (well, younger than me, if not by much) before she was a quarter of the way across the capacious lobby. “Hey,” I said. “I think you’re making a mistake here.”

She looked at me with what was either numbness or incomprehensible calm, and said levelly, “I’m not.”

Just that straight. Strange man accosts you in the lobby, tells you you’re making a mistake, and no reaction at all. She wasn’t defensive, defiant, bewildered, determined … nothing there. Just stating a fact, as unemotionally as saying the sun was up. And there was more than that: women are my specialty, and they _always_ respond to me, positively or negatively or conflicted or dismissive or flustered, but never nothing. She wasn’t resisting it, she wasn’t even ignoring it: she genuinely didn’t know it was there. I was out of my depth in the first seconds … but Ariel had sent me for a reason, and I still needed Ariel on my side, so I made one more attempt. “We all make choices. You’re making one right now, and I know how that is. Make enough of them, though, and the choices start making _you.”_ I knew I was paraphrasing Ariel’s spiel to me, but I had a feeling that was what she had wanted me to do. Putting sincerity and conviction in my voice (but I was already feeling those not-register in the woman in front of me), I said, “If this isn’t what you want to be made into, you might be looking at your last chance to be anything else.”

“I already am what I am,” she said back to me. “I need something. Someone has what I need. This is how I get what I need.” Again no heat, no insistence, no emotion at all. “You’re about to be in the way of me getting what I need. You shouldn’t do that.”

I held my hands up in surrender. “Okay, I did my best. Sorry I bothered you.” She waited for me to move out of her way, and I did, but a last-second impulse had me asking, “Just … what’s your name?”

In the final uncanny moment of this entire uncanny exchange, I could still feel nothing at all from her, and yet could see her consider refusing me an answer and then decide it didn’t matter. “Natalie,” she said, and then she was past me and continuing to the reception desk with even, unhurried strides.

Back at the doors, Ariel was still pale but seemed to have regained whatever control had briefly deserted her. “I’m sorry,” I said as I came to her. “I tried, but I’m afraid it was a lost cause before I started. She was … unshakeable.”

“I know.” Ariel was still staring at the woman’s back. “I … it was so … I don’t even _know_ what to think.” She studied me searchingly. “But you tried. Thank you.”

I shrugged it away. “For whatever that was worth. Which, apparently, was nothing.”

“It matters,” she insisted. “Even if you can’t see it, it matters.” She looked away from me, and this time when she said it, it was more like a prayer: “You’re a good person.”

Poor kid. I had done my best to set her straight, but she’d just have to discover the disappointment for herself.


	4. Chapter 4

We did, in fact, take a cab, and had it drop us off several blocks from our destination. We walked the rest of the way, while I laid out the facts for Ariel. “Cholk’s an organizer, and he discovered he actually likes building things. Not everything he does is shady, he gets a lot of his income — maybe even most of it — for legitimate activities, filling in gaps for other outfits and keeping things running smoothly. That gives him bank to fund the occasional project of his own, and this is one of them.” I gestured ahead of us. “It’s almost completed, so he’s using this place for his business offices while he finishes polishing the edges. That’s where he’ll have the files I was talking about, and the wards we have to pass through. Which this —” I held up the token she had retrieved. “— should accomplish.” (Assuming she had in fact found the right one, but I was getting the feeling she wouldn’t turn out to be wrong about that. Just something about her … her naïvete made her unreliable in some areas, but I didn’t think this was one of them.)

Ariel was looking ahead as if studying, though I wouldn’t have thought us close enough yet for her to make out any detail. “So what kind of place is this? what is it for?”

For once, I had no answer. I knew the basic layout, the construction timetable, even several of the shift schedules, but I had never thought to inquire as to the original purpose. I glanced at the third member of our raiding party. “Merl?”

“What am I, Wikipedia?” he grumped, but then he waved spindly fingers at the area around us. “We’re a coupla blocks from one of the local colleges, and I think Cholk got the tip they might be expanding a few years from now. He bought the land, and he’s puttin’ together stuff he figures they’ll want. — which’d be a pretty long call, unless he’s got inside info, so he probably does.” He nodded toward our destination. “That one, now, I think it’s supposed to be laid out for, whatsit, flexible purposing, but _my_ ear to the ground says they’re settin’ it up so it can be used as a gymnasium, small arena, maybe event-type hall. Probably mainly the first, ’cause he’s at least checkin’ prices on those swivel-up/swivel-down basketball backboards.”

“Sports arena,” Ariel repeated, as if trying out the words. “Okay, that’ll be a new one … even if I did hear Buffy burned down her first gym, like, for_ever_ ago.” Hearing that name, unexpectedly, triggered an involuntary spurt of adrenaline that I had to hope didn’t show; I’d thought I got past that long ago, I had _much_ more important things to focus on now, but apparently it was still a tender area. While I was still checking myself for control, Ariel lifted an eyebrow and said, “Whoa. Glass everywhere, interior lights … that’s going to be really hard to sneak through, why do they have the lights on this time of night?”

“To make it harder to sneak through, naturally.” I shrugged. “And sometimes Cholk has night shifts come in to do after-hours work, and there’s at least one guard-crew.”

Merl stopped where he was. “Seriously? **Seriously?!** Of all the _shruschkuch_-damn —!”

“I know you don’t like risks,” I interrupted, trying to head off another puss-out. “I also know you’ll take some for the right reward. That’s why you’re here.”

“I’ll take chances, sure,” he groused. “But that’s when I’m workin’ solo, where **_I_** check the layout and **_I_** make the plan and **_I_** pick out which way I wanna go, ’cause _I don’t trust anybody else doin’ it for me!_ Which you’d better bet includes you! This isn’t my kinda scene, and you know it, and now you’re tryin’ to push me inta some place with a friggin’ _demon guard crew —?!!”_

“I can handle guards,” Ariel put in, almost casually.

Merl rounded on her. “Can you handle ’em so nobody knows I was ever there? Nah, you’ll bust through ’em ’n’ retouch your nail-gloss and breeze along on your way ’cause you don’t have to worry about whatever mess you leave. Well, I do, and I already _said_ something about that, and if nobody’s listenin’ to me then I need to be some­where else right the hell now!”

Ariel settled back, crossed her arms, and looked to me. Good that she wasn’t trying to take charge, but the message clearly was _Let’s see if you can handle this,_ which didn’t improve my mood. “I don’t need you to go inside, Merl,” I said with as much patience as I could bring to bear.

“No?” He glared at me. “Then why am I here? You keep talkin’ about pay, but I know you’re not payin’ for charming company!”

“Okay,” I corrected. “What I mean is, I don’t expect you to come inside with us. I just need you to go in far enough to get _us_ inside, then you can move on. Like back at the high-rise: shallow penetration, open a door for us, and that’s all.”

He squinted suspiciously at me. “That wasn’t all you wanted from me back there,” he said accusingly.

“No, I knew I’d need someone to get in and find the token, which I knew you could do. This isn’t drift-searching an uptown condo, though, so we don’t need your finer touch, we can handle the rest ourselves once you let us in. You won’t even have to hang around after that, you can move on and we’ll meet to settle up later.” (Which was asking for a different kind of trust, but I’d used Merl’s services before and might need them again, and he knew I understood keeping debts paid in order to leave future prospects open.) “Few minutes more work,” I wheedled, “then you’re done for the night. That’s all it’ll take.”

He studied us both with doubtful, bristly hostility, then his features resumed their normal disgruntled expression. “Show me what access point you got picked out,” he demanded gracelessly. “Then we’ll see.”

He stalked off ahead of us toward the target building, all self-affronted indignation. Ariel looked after him, back at me. “Is he really worth all the effort it takes to handle him?” she wondered.

I sighed. “Usually? yes. Right now? basically a coin-toss.”

She nodded at that, then added, “I notice you’ve stopped bothering to call him Bart.”

After a frozen moment I smiled at her, as if amused. “Well, neither you nor Katie were really buying it,” I said. “And I only started in the first place when I thought I was diverting unfriendly attention from him. Didn’t really seem worth keeping up the charade once I knew what we were headed for tonight.”

(Actually I had plain forgot, which shook me. I can lie smoothly, pretty much effortlessly, so this was a serious lapse in my normal habit. Were Ariel’s dogged attempts to reform me causing enough mental static to break my concentration? That wouldn’t be a good sign, so it was fortunate we were nearing the end of our business.)

We had to get considerably closer before I could make out what Ariel had spotted some distance back, though of course I already knew it. Gleaming white brick, glass on every side and an even larger area in the front with a glass ceiling over the entry enclosure and a huge circular window in the front supplying a ready view of the stairs that went up either side of the interior to the first mezzanine … Architecturally, it was striking; functionally, it was beautifully effective; for a would-be burglar, a nightmare to be scrupulously avoided. Which was the plan.

I led the others on a wide quarter-arc around the perimeter, came in at the rear. The area was clear of the poled lights, and trees and other buildings gave us good shadow cover. “There,” I said, pointing Merl to the spot I had chosen as the weak point. “Right there, third floor. In, down, let us in that door _there”_ — pointing again — “and then you can move along and I’ll meet you at Del’s tomorrow night with your payment.”

Now this was a funny thing about Merl: against everything you would expect of such a character, he never bothered negotiating his fee in advance, at least not with me. I don’t know if it was because he knew I’d pay fair (unlikely, since he made it a life-rule to never actually trust anybody) or because past events had shown I had a good track record and he just liked the argument. We’d spend hours disputing how much _he_ said he was worth against what **_I_** was willing to pay, and in the end neither one of us would be satisfied but we’d both decide that was the best we could do. It was baked into the process, and I had learned to accept the tediousness of it as part of the cost: Merl being Merl. So, unsurprisingly, he let that bit pass, eyed the spots I had indicated to him, and rasped, “Already told you that stuff hurts. This is gonna cost you.”

“Don’t I know it,” I acknowledged.

He made a rude noise, and started taking off his clothes. The hoodie, the turtleneck underneath, the skinny-leg jeans … he started with his shoes, actually, and I observed that he’d had to use three layers of socks to get them to stay on his feet. What we had at the end was five and a half feet of scrawny gray-scaled Merl, a neon-yellow Speedo preserving whatever remained of anything he might consider modesty, shaking out his arms and doing deep bends to prepare for the final task ahead. Ariel shot me an inquisitive glance, and I just gestured for her to keep watching: seeing it would trump any attempt at explanation.

“Hey,” I called to him. “Don’t forget this.” I held up the token on its wire loop.

He took it from me with a snort of disdain, dropped the loop around his neck. Still rotating his neck and head and rolling his shoulders, he went to the building, stretched upward, pressed his arms and upper chest against the brick … and stuck. Then he raised one leg, bent like a frog’s, and likewise adhered it to the building side. That secured, he detached his left arm from the brickwork and reached up to press that to a higher spot, used those anchors to hold him while he brought up his left leg. Moving at this rate, a couple of feet every thirty seconds, he crept up the wall like a big warty gecko, stick and pull and unstick to reach for the next pull up. I don’t know if this was something normal to Merl’s species, or if he was a partial throwback to an earlier stage of development, or if he had somehow developed and acquired it as a useful personal talent (I knew something about things like that), but it was a capability that came in handy more often than you would expect.

When he reached the upper area I had indicated, either a really narrow window or a really wide vent, he sort of gradually oozed in through it, a further application of the trick he had used to get past the bars at Cholk’s place. Ariel waited till he had disappeared within before looking to me. “You know the most interesting people,” she said.

There was a deadpan quality to it that made me smile. Her idealism might be unrealistic, but that didn’t mean she was one-dimensional. “Life does get fun,” I agreed.

Another minute, minute and half, the ground floor door opened and Merl stepped out, holding it for us and rubbing at his chest and arms as if they itched so bad he was afraid to start scratching lest he bear down till skin came off. “You got anything else, you better save it for later,” he told me truculently. “This is already about three times as much as I bargained for.”

“No, we’re good for the night.” I reached out to brace the door. “Feel anything from the token?”

“Nah,” he said, shaking his head. “Maybe the wards’re further in, maybe it doesn’t give feedback.” I held out my hand; he lifted the token from his neck, passed it over, piping snidely, “ ‘Thanks, Merl. Couldn’t’a done it without ya, Merl. You’ll be getting a fat bonus, Merl, ’cause you’re so totes awesome.’ ”

“Thanks, Merl,” I said back. “Probably could’ve done it without you, but it would have been kind of a pain.” _(Like you.)_ “We’ll talk about the bonus.” _(Possible, not too likely.)_ “You want us to wait till you get dressed again?”

“Yeah, sure,” he sneered. “Like I want ta hang around you two a minute more’n I gotta.” He gathered up his clothes and headed out, staying to shadows and aiming for deeper shadow, meanwhile muttering things I seriously doubted were in any way complimentary.

I put the loop-with-token around my own neck, tucking it securely under my collar, then beckoned Ariel inside and let the door close behind us once we were in. “You never need a light with Merl around,” I said to her. “He’s just a ray of sunshine all by himself.”

“Word,” Ariel replied, which almost made me crack up. When did suburban white girls start picking up ’hood slang?

We headed down the hallway ahead of us, the brightness of the lighting inside making any notion of concealment impossible; we’d just have to move swiftly and hope we could avoid running into anybody. “From here on, it’s mostly checking possibilities,” I told her, voice pitched low. “I have some idea of the interior construction, so I know the places Cholk _shouldn’t_ have office space and the places where he _probably_ has office space, but I can’t swear to any of it. The best spots should be up on the levels overlooking the arena-area and the floor right above that, so that’s where we’ll start.”

“Right,” she said, moving ahead with confidence: the high-school girl had taken a leave of absence, and I was now looking at a combat soldier on a patrol that she knew from long habit. From her backpack she’d pulled out something I’d never seen before, a kind of long leather thing shaped like a stretched-out bowling pin; catching my curious look, Ariel slapped the thicker part against her palm, holding the other end as a handle. “Steel shot inside,” she explained. “Like a big blackjack. Non-lethal if that’s how I want to go, nasty enough if I need to get serious.”

I nodded, and kept on without answering. Till now I’d borne some simulation of leadership, simply because I had the plan and understood the basics, but now we were in her territory again and I shifted back into follow-and-support (while taking care to stay level with her) without really having to think about it. If nothing else, it was certainly reassuring to have the strongest fighter rignt next to me …

Halfway up the first set of stairs, I felt the kind of tingling buzz that had been described in the texts I’d studied getting ready for this: the token had encountered the edge of the wards. “Bingo,” I told Ariel. “We’re inside the alarm field, the token worked. Clear sailing from here.” I knew she’d heard me, but she didn’t respond, just forged on ahead, focused and intent. That was good. That was what I needed. This was according to plan.

We were past the second floor, almost to one of the mezzanines, when we hit the guard patrol. No avoiding them: we were nearing the top of that set of stairs, out in open view, and they rounded the bend at the end of the hallway up ahead. They’d seen us in the first instant, of course, and we could fight or we could run but this was a Slayer, Ariel went for them as if she’d just been waiting for the starting gun, and I pelted after her because … well, because for now this was where I needed to be.

There were seven of them, more than I had expected for this site at this hour and quite a few more than I’d ever spied out gathered here as a group. Human-appearing, but they moved just a little not-quite-right, and several had started shifting into something more combat-capable by the time (seconds later) that Ariel hit, driving into them with an impact like a half-stick of TNT.

The halls were roomy enough for a middle-sized game-day crowd, but that’s not the same as effective space for a melee, and the guard crew had to maneuver around each other while Ariel was a one-girl blitz squad all on her own. She slammed into them in an abrupt thunderbolt of violence, using the long-sap with precise, devastating effect, I think she must have dropped two of the guards in the first second or so and the remainder were hard-pressed even to stay upright and mobile. I caught up to where she had hit just as another two angled around her while she was momentarily occupied with three more; I think they might have been thinking of flanking her (or, perhaps, simply running once they were past her), but at the sight of me they decided here was an easier target, and came for me with yelps of unwelcome eagerness.

The hardest part of fighting demons isn’t how tough they are (though there’s plenty of that), it’s that their physiologies vary so much you can never be sure of the best targets. With that in mind, I tried always to have something broad-spectrum at hand, which paid off now. I smacked them both with pepper spray while they were still eight feet away, side-stepping quickly to avoid catching any drift-back myself, then used the taser on the farther one; the closer one had gone to his knees, swiping at his eyes with the backs of knobby hands that seemed to have been in the process of extruding claws, and I skipped forward to snap an instep-strike into his throat with as much force as I could bring to bear while still keeping balance.

He rolled away, making a revolting gargling noise, and the one I had tasered was enough recovered to come at me again, albeit not too steadily. One-on-one was better than one-on-two, but still a long way from my own preferences; I jinked out of his path, slammed a downward-slanting side-kick into his knee as he went past (like throats, knees are fairly reliable as vulnerable points, though different species can require being struck from different angles), and he stumbled and came around again and I _really_ needed a more specific weapon right now but Ariel was next to me with startling quickness, touching my erstwhile enemy on the point of the shoulder with a deceptively gentle stroke of the long-sap, followed by a casual tap to the side of the head that dropped him as if he’d taken a bullet between the eyes. A few steps forward, and she repeated the sleep-tap on the one I’d throat-kicked, and now everything was quiet.

She wasn’t sweating, wasn’t mussed, wasn’t remotely shaken. “Huh,” she said, looking at the still forms around us. “That was more than I expected to run into all in the same place.”

I _was_ sweating, and my adrenaline was running high. “And they really looked like they were following routine about the time they spotted us,” I noted. “Doesn’t seem likely that every guard in the place would be roaming the halls in a clump; that could mean there are more teams out there. I don’t know what type these are —”

“Camber-Pyclet,” Ariel supplied for me. “Not top-class in the muscle range, but they do better than most at operating as a group. And they’re pretty good at passing for human, so the ones that want to, can get the kind of work that needs that.”

“Right,” I agreed. “The thing is, if they _were_ on rounds, we’ve got only just so much time before they’re missed and somebody starts checking to find out why.” I looked up at the third floor. “If we could have got up there, stayed out of sight, we could have spent awhile checking out likely spots, maybe taken the rest of the night and still left without anybody knowing we’d been here. That approach just went out the window.” I was thinking quickly now, rolling possibilities through my head and finding only a limited range of answers. I pointed to the hallway from which the Camber-Pyclet had emerged. “Some of the possible offices are there. Others are upstairs. We need speed now; you check here, I’ll run up to the third floor.”

The speed part was absolutely true, but Ariel took an extra moment anyhow: staring at me intently, doing that impression of trying to see through me into my soul. I couldn’t have begun to read her face. “Okay,” she said to me at last. “Okay. Katie was suspicious of you, I know, but I’m not Katie. I’m trusting you because I know you can be trusted.” She put her hand on my chest, as if trying to impart some kind of benediction to me, and there is just no way I could describe whatever was in her eyes. “I believe in you. You’re a good person, even if you don’t believe it yourself.” She took her hand away. “So go do what you have to do.”

I don’t know if I could have found an answer to that, but I didn’t have to. She turned from me and strode away in the direction I had indicated, and I exited the area in relief, quick-footing my way up the remaining stairs to the third floor.

Now: I hadn’t lied to her, even if I hadn’t told her everything. The way I had sent her _did_ have probable offices, and in fact I suspected that the files I’d told her about were more likely to be there than anywhere else, so I’d steered her right. Upstairs, though …

Upstairs were the areas I had good reason to believe Cholk was using as storerooms.

The last several years have been, for me, an unending scramble for every advantage I can ferret out for myself. I was crazy when I went into the Old Man’s domain, some irrational part of me so caught up in obsession that I was willing to pay any cost to get what I wanted. It wasn’t even that I’d never wondered if it was an acceptable sacrifice: he’d asked me himself, _Is she worth it?_ And I’d already known the answer, and said it: _No._ But I’d gone on ahead anyway.

Like I said, crazy. Well, obsession doesn’t last forever, and he’d been right: there was no way to hold her, not Buffy Summers. She was gone almost the moment we returned to mundane reality, so quickly that I thought she’d been snatched back like Eurydice till I saw her fighting the surreal demon-biker crew, and fully realized that ‘bringing her out’ and ‘keeping her’ weren’t remotely the same thing. That, also, was when I first began seriously considering the price I’d accepted with so little concern for consequences.

Ever since then, I’ve kept myself concentrated on one fundamental concept: _Face reality. Look at the world as it actually is. Never mind feelings, forget ideals, skip past self-image and self-concept and self-actualization._ **Face reality.** I’d let my feelings lead me literally into hell; only my rational mind, holding fast to clear, cold reality, could keep me from returning there.

He’d said he had a long memory for grudges. I didn’t doubt it. He’d said I had an excellent chance of winding up back under his authority. I figured he’d know how that worked better than I did, and so I’d have to take it seriously. I’d outmaneuvered him once, when he hadn’t realized just how much I was bringing to the contest; I wouldn’t have that advantage in any second meeting, and didn’t know any certain way of avoiding such a meeting.

So I had to gather _all_ the advantages I could.

That was what my life had become. Learning, training, accumulating knowledge and experience and artifacts, seeking out everything that might possibly be of use to me and thinking of new ways to use what I found. _Magic-users can’t pack enough juice to make much of a dent,_ he’d said; but, I had established that effective application could deflect and outperform raw power, and if I collected enough different things and practiced endless combinations of how to mix and bring them to bear, that might be enough to tip the balance. My life, my self, hadn’t narrowed to a single perspective; I was still me, still as focused on _living_ as on _staying alive,_ but all the same there were two things now that mattered more than anything else. The first was staying out of the Old Man’s demesne for as long as I could, forever if possible; the second was equipping myself to get _out_ again if I should chance to find myself there after all. The only real way to accomplish the first was immortality (and I was working on that, even if the prospects weren’t too promising). The second, now —

I’d been collecting advantages. Cholk was a collector, too, and over a great deal of time and study I had confirmed that his collection included something I very much wanted.

The bracelet on my left wrist had an inscription on the inside. I turned that around to face outward, pricked the ball of my thumb with the smallest blade on my pocket knife, and used that same blade to carefully sketch a pentagram, in blood, on the round face of the bracelet, breathing the prescribed words of power as the last point of the pentagram was joined. A faint wash of orange-tinged light outlined everything in my vision: it was only for _my_ eyes, but it showed me which way to go.

I followed the path it laid out, kicking in the door when it wouldn’t open and pushing into the interior. I was growing more and more frantic, horribly conscious of the time that might be trickling away and fighting doggedly to keep control of myself; I was probably knocking aside priceless treasures to get to the one I wanted, and part of me knew it, but I’d lost the opportunity to assess other possibilities at leisure, I had to grab this one while it was still in reach. I kept going, sweeping shelves clear of artifacts I didn’t recognize and shoving the shelves themselves out of my way, sticking to the quest-line the basic spell had provided.

I found it, smashed the locked chest against the bare concrete of the floor and pulled the precious sachet out of the revealed cavity. There was a chant, and I had learned it months ago and intoned it now; there was a ritual, gestures and timing and postures and invocations, and I went through them in the proper order; there was a moment when I was to hold the sewn-cloth bag above my head and tear it apart, letting the crush-powdered contents sift down onto my upturned face and into my open mouth and eyes while I inhaled as much as I could, and I did that and held myself absolutely still as I felt the core of the inlaid enchantment begin to seep into me.

Tools were fine, I gathered them and I applied them for best effect. Weapons were valuable, techniques were useful, knowledge was welcome, I sought it all and took whatever came into my reach. This, though: if this worked as the scrolls had promised, it would become _part_ of me, something bound to my essence and all but impossible to take away. Now just give it a few minutes to finish infusing me and becoming bonded to the foundations of my being —

Distantly, but clearly, I heard shouts, and sounds of new combat, and Ariel cried out my name with an urgency I’d never before heard from her. I couldn’t imagine anything Cholk might have hired that could challenge a Slayer (thus my eagerness to have one along), but it was there in her voice: desperation, entreaty, wild overriding _need_ …

… and do you know, I almost started to go to her? I was actually turning toward that cry, my feet about to drive me back out into that hall and down the stairs between us, when I caught myself.

No. No. You didn’t come as far as I had by letting yourself get distracted from essentials. It was a matter of focus. It was a matter of setting priorities and sticking to them. It was a matter of never losing sight of the difference between what-might-be-nice and the-way-it-_has-to-_BE. I still needed that minute or two for the ritual to have the completed effect. Ariel … Ariel would buy me that time.

I waited, feeling the magic settle into me, permeating every part of me and becoming solid. Listened to her screaming my name over the noises of battle, in despair and anguish and something else that sounded terribly like … grief. _You’re a good person,_ she’d kept insisting, as if she could make it true by saying it. _I believe in you._

She should have known better.

The process reached its conclusion, I felt it, a second or so before something else happened: another scream, but this one blasted out with scorching fury and in Katie’s voice. Hadn’t been expecting that but wasn’t surprised, it made sense that she’d indulge her doubts of me by shadowing from a long way off and then come streaking to her friend’s aid when everything went to crap. It also meant I wouldn’t have to worry much about further guards, two Slayers would shred everything around them and any adversaries would either be drawn to _that_ noise or highly inclined to get as far away from it as possible.

I took a deep breath, gathered the new energies around me — groping my way through my first use of them, but it felt right, like buried but newly-awakened instinct — and _ghosted,_ moving out into the hall and away from the redoubled clash behind me. The world around me was laid out in shades of sepia, but the details were etched with unnatural clarity; nobody would see me, nobody could touch me, I was walking inside a different plane of existence and there were so very many useful things that could be done with something like that. Pressing forward, and turning my mind toward the possibilities ahead instead of all that lay unimportant and forgotten in my wake.

* * *

So that’s the story of how I almost killed the Slayer, _that_ Slayer. Not because I intended to, not because I had anything against her; she was just a means to an end, and in the final analysis that’s all any of us are to anybody else. I almost killed her because she insisted on seeing the world as she wanted it to be, instead of as it actually is. I don’t hold it against her, and if you want to know the truth, I genuinely hope she someday reaches the point where she can face the necessities in front of her on a basis of reality, instead of wishful thinking.

Whatever she does, though, is up to her, and she’ll do it — or she won’t — without me. Either way, I’ll be where I am, doing what I do.

Keeping my focus where it was always going to be. 

  
end


End file.
